Last month we visited the Thermaltake HQ in Taipei where we stumbled upon a few products where we got the chance to film them on video in this pre-CES 2012 preview of some new cooling products from the Taiwanese company.

Starting off in the air department we have the Frio Extreme which is similar in design to past Frio series air coolers from Thermaltake, but the Extreme version which will come out sometime in Q1 2012 takes things to a whole new level being able to provide up to 250 watts of CPU cooling ability.

Included on the cooler are two 120mm cooling fans and two aluminum heat blocks with six heatpipes. This cooler also comes with a new fan controller attached to it which allows you to adjust the fan speed in a small little black unit.

The world may be going through some changes, and I really think we're just beginning to scrape the surface of a real GFC, but Taiwanese foundries are talking about slicing prices by 10- to 15-percent for wafters built on mature node processes.

These wafters have lower production costs, so the foundries are passing on the savings to you and me, the customer. The move is said to build consumer confidence in building their inventory after a shaky 2011 in the U.S. and European markets. DigiTimes reports that although there is slow demand for mature process manufacturing, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) continues to see orders build up for the advanced 28nm technology (such as the great Radeon HD 7970 from AMD), according to sources at non Taiwan-based chip suppliers.

This is only a good thing, savings on technology. It also allows vendors to buy cheaper, and pass those savings onto the customer, too. All we need now is a drop in the mid to high-end range of GPUs and I'll be happy. Give me some HD 7970's for under $500 AUD and I'll be a happy chappy.

The first picture of a non-reference design AMD Radeon HD 7970, which comes from Gigabyte. The GV-R797OC-3GD is a factory-overclocked card, which makes use of Gigabyte's Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB and custom-design triple-fan WindForce cooler.

The Ultra Durable VGA+ PCB uses a 2oz copper layer for better electrical stability and heat distribution, ferrite-core chokes, low RDS (on) MOSFETs, hand-picked high-performance GDDR5 memory chips, and more. The cooler sports a combination of heatsinks and aluminum fin arrays to feed heat from the GPU, memory, and VRM to its copper heat-pipes and ventilated by three fans.

Gigabyte make use of a non-reference design, using non-reference cooling assembly, but most likely a reference design PCB, except, it's red. No details on clock speeds or pricing yet.

In the January 2012 issue of UK magazine PSM3, they suggest that the fourth major instalment in the PlayStation-exclusive God Of War series is coming at the end of this year and will feature online co-op play.

Co-op has been popular lately, with Resistance 3, Dead Island, Gears of War 3 and Portal 2 all sporting the amazing feature. Not that it's new, but it seemed to disappear when next-gen consoles and their seemingly watered-down games started coming out.

GoW IV's development news is nothing new, but the co-op nugget is. GoW IV will see players breaking out of Hades, with the two protagonists will be a dearly-departed Kratos and his equally undead brother, Deimos. I hope to see some more on this soon.

Welcome to 2012, where the end of the world is higher TV prices. This is what TV manufacturers such as LG want to bring, after being hit by profit declines over the years, this year will start with even thinner and lighter TVs in the hopes of sparking new customer interest and driving the average TV price, higher.

LG said on Friday that it plans to sell a 55-inch TV that is just, wait for it, 3/16 of an inch thick and only weighs 16.5 pounds. Samsung are expected to unveil a similar TV at the industry's biggest trade fair, Consumer Electronics Show, in just a few days time in Las Vegas.

Both companies have yet to discuss the thing we rub between our fingers as a gesture for... money. Of course, this new technology is expected to have a nice premium. NPD DisplaySearch estimates the new 55-inch TV models will begin at around $8000 in Q3 2012, and fall below the $4000 mark by the end of 2013 as sales volume increases and companies find new ways to manufacture the TVs less expensively.

First off, Happy New Year! I hope you're all enjoying your festivities, while here in South Australia it has been a blistering 41C (over 104F) for the past 2 days straight and it is currently 43C right now. Joy! Onto the news! Our GPU editor sent this to me, and at first I thought it was tease, because he loves to do that to me. But, it was not, it was news that had floated onto the great world wide web.

Sapphire's leaked document, which reveals their non-reference AMD Radeon HD 7970's that they are currently baking in Sapphire ovens. Sapphire have an amazing six cards that will be non-reference, all ranging in features, speeds and more. One of them is the "Atomic RX" which goes from the original 1000MHz Core speed to a whopping 1335MHz. It sports the usual 3GB of RAM up from the 5500MHz stock speed, to 5735MHz. Output-wise, we have 2 x MiniDisplayPort, 1 x HDMI 1.4a and 1 x Single Link DVI.

There is also an "Atomic WC" which seems to be identical, but a water-cooled version. The other models include "Toxic 3G" which has a GPU clock of 1125MHz and 5600MHz RAM, "FLEX 6G" which as you guessed, has 6GB of RAM and 6 x MiniDisplayPort outputs with GPU clocks of just 925MHz and 5500MHz RAM, "VaporX 3G" which should have Sapphire's awesome VaporX cooler, with GPU clocks of 1010MHz and 5500MHz RAM. The final two are the Dual-Fan 3G with 925MHz Core and 5500MHz RAM and finally, the stock "Da Original" with 925MHz GPU clocks and 5500MHz RAM.

This is one game I hope doesn't get affected by consolitis, where Gearbox have shared some information about the next Borderlands title. It has already been reported that the four playable characters would be either replaced, or drastically altered, but one of them was already teased: a bearded dwarf named "Salvador" is a "Gunzerker" who can dual-wield any two weapons, and acts like Brick the Berserker from the original Borderlands.

Back in August, two of his abilities were teased. The first one increases the fire rate of any gun the longer the trigger is held, while the second boosts accuracy when dual-wielding same class weapons or doubles damage with mixed class weapons.

But now, we have some backstory to this character, with Gearbox saying:

Microsoft have released a rare out-of-band update to fix a vulnerability in the .NET Framework. The update comes weeks before the next regularly scheduled "Patch Tuesday" in mid-January, and addresses a flaw that could allow attackers to exploit hash tables to perform a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against a website built with Microsoft's ASP.NET application framework.

DoS attacks usually require thousands of malware-controlled systems in a botnet to overwhelm a site with requests. This opening would allow an attacker to cripple a vulnerable site by sending a certain type of HTTP request. Each of these requests would consume 100-percent of one CPU core. As you can imagine, the more of these requests, the more CPU power that is zapped away.

Microsoft says "Attacks targeting this type of vulnerability are generically known as hash collision attacks." They also added that the problem is not specific to Microsoft's Web services as it affects PHP 5, Java, .NET, v8 and even PHP 4, Ruby and Python. The people behind these platforms will release updates soon, but the holidays will dampen these efforts.

Samsung's Galaxy Note, the uber-large, but curvaceously sexy Galaxy Note, which sports a 5.3-inch screen is a kind of tabletphone hybrid. This hasn't stopped the device from shipping more than 1 million in Europe and Asia, before it even hits the shores of the U.S.

The rapid sales of the device show Samsung that creating a new market for something between a smartphone and tablet PC. Samsung says that the speed of sales should accelerate even further going into the new year when it becomes available in the U.S.

Samsung also note that the Financial Times reviewed the Galaxy Note highly, commenting it as:

Earlier this week we attended a Thecus lunch here in Taipei where we were served up an exclusive look at its upcoming N4800 NAS.

You can think of the N4800 as a refresher of the N4200 PRO NAS which did very well for Thecus this year. It has been upgraded with a faster Intel Atom processor that includes with it a faster GPU as well as chipset and USB 3.0.

Vincent from Thecus was kind enough to go on video as you can see above where he also introduced us to the dual bay N2800 NAS. Both new NAS as we've mentioned come with HDMI output which is able to output HD video at 1080p as well as allow you to use the NAS admin interface and other NAS applications directly on your television.